A Conspiracy Melts Down Into Washers and Dryers

Fred Koval found a home in Gulfport, Miss., for hundreds of former Soviet-bloc vehicles.Credit
Jennifer Zdon for The New York Times

GULFPORT, Miss. — The planned overthrow of the United States government ended rather prosaically this fall, with a giant pile of mashed-up trucks in a muddy scrap yard a mile or so off the Interstate.

The crew at Alter Metal Recycling has been piling up the old trucks since the summer and sending them to Alabama, for melting down and reincarnation as everything from cars to washers and dryers.

The process is pretty standard, said Troy Brooks, the yard supervisor. But these trucks were a little different.

“There were a lot of rumors flying around about them,” he said.

In certain circles in the mid-’90s, among those inclined to keep an eye out for black helicopters, they were more than just rumors. To them, the presence of 700 military-looking trucks bearing Soviet-bloc markings in a weed-strewn lot north of Gulfport was clear proof of a United Nations-brokered plan to take over the United States.

The specific outlines of such a plot were rather vague. But conspiracy-cult radio shows and right-wing fringe newsletters delivered somber reports about the vehicles, speaking of armored tanks and secret roads and the role of the vehicles in the establishment of a New World Order.

“There have also been reports that the vehicles are being shipped by barges on the Pearl River,” one dispatch read gravely, “north to some unknown destination.”

The apparent threat to national security was broadcast so far and wide that one night in 1994 Timothy J. McVeigh himself broke into the yard to examine the vehicles firsthand. He went away disappointed.

But the real tale behind the trucks, as is often the case, turns out to be more interesting than the conspiracy.

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Conspiracy theorists turned the vehicles, which are now piled for scrap, into a plot to overthrow the government.Credit
Jennifer Zdon for The New York Times

Charles Chawafaty, an Egyptian businessman, and Fred Koval, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, first met in a Saudi Arabian prison.

Mr. Koval, now 88, a bomber in World War II, a pilot during the Berlin airlift and a man generally game for adventure, had moved to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, in 1979 to teach electronics at a school run by the Lockheed Corporation.

In 1981, Mr. Koval helped out a New Orleans businessman who was having trouble leaving the country, but who eventually did — using a passport in Mr. Koval’s name. And so Mr. Koval spent four and a half months in a Saudi prison. While there, he said, he met Mr. Chawafaty.

Mr. Chawafaty said in an interview by e-mail that he had been “accused of insulting the prophet of Islam and the Saudi royal family.”

Not long afterward, Mr. Koval returned to his home in Biloxi, Miss. (a return journey, he said, that included a furtive three-day trip across the Red Sea to Sudan in a motorboat), and Mr. Chawafaty left Saudi Arabia (under a compromise, he said, that involved a promise not to return unless he converted from Methodism to Islam). The two kept in touch.

In 1993, Mr. Chawafaty’s company, Agrinvest International, which is based in Phoenix, bought roughly 1,000 former Soviet-bloc vehicles that had been demilitarized and auctioned after German reunification. He paid $3 million, he said, including shipping expenses.

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Around 350 were stored in Britain; the rest — 700 or so Russian, Czech and East German trucks and tankers — made their way to the Mississippi coast. Mr. Koval had found 18 acres north of Gulfport where they could be stored.

“Maybe he can explain to you why he bought this” stuff, Mr. Koval said over coffee at a Waffle House in Biloxi.

Mr. Chawafaty, now 65, said the plan was to retrofit the vehicles and sell them to the United Nations for humanitarian missions around the world. It made sense to use Soviet-bloc trucks in places like Africa, he said, where Soviet-era parts were widely available.

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Fred KovalCredit
Jennifer Zdon for The New York Times

Some of the trucks were painted white and turned into ambulances, others into snowplows, refugee transport vehicles and refrigeration vans.

All of this set off the conspiracy theories. Mr. Koval said he kept the most outlandish of them in what he called his “banana file.”

“But none of it attracted buyers,” he said.

The vehicles were not permitted for use on American roads because of their reliance on leaded gas, among other things. A few trucks were donated to a relief organization in Mexico, Mr. Chawafaty said. Others were given to the Air Force for shooting practice.

One man in Guyana planned to buy a few, and even set off for Biloxi to pick them up, said Mr. Koval, who looked after the trucks until 1999. But the man died of a heart attack during a layover in Miami.

Another plan was to take the heavy cargo shells off the trucks and sell them as storm shelters or tool sheds. Mr. Koval estimates that a dozen or so of these were sold. He still has a few on his property, Cyrillic lettering on the outside, cobwebs and junk on the inside.

In the end, the vehicles mostly sat unwanted in the lot beside Highway 49, next to the Friendly Pawn Shop and across the way from a discount liquor store. The conspiracy theories dwindled, as did the visits by customs officials.

The rusting accelerated after Hurricane Katrina, and for various reasons, including a civil court judgment, the expiration of a trade license and the fact that nobody was interested in rust-covered trucks, Mr. Chawafaty decided to scrap them.

Mr. Koval learned about their impending demise by reading about it in the newspaper like anyone else.

“Crazy, crazy, crazy,” he said.

And he laughed about the whole episode, which produced little more than proof that most business schemes, like most conspiracy theories, will eventually end up on the ash heap of history.

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2010, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: A Conspiracy Melts Down Into Washers And Dryers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe